Journey around Leadership
Amanda Sinclair∗
The University of Melbourne, Australia
Ideas about leadership in education, as in other areas of professional practice, increasingly borrow from management
and business thinking. In this paper I provide a commentary and critique of contemporary leadership in the form of a
narrative of my own experience as an educator in a business school. My experiences as a woman teacher of largely
male adult management students, has underscored my learning and critique of leadership theory and my own
aspirations as teacher and leader. Personal experience is interwoven with theoretical commentary to highlight the
limitations of leadership discourses—too often disembodied, de-gendered and de-sexualised. By inserting my
responses and feelings I also seek to subvert, or at least add some different dimensions to, intellectualized and inert
critiques of leadership. Learning about leadership, including engagement, reaction and contestation, is not just a
cerebral undertaking, but emotionally-laden and thoroughly embodied. I sought to reflect these qualities in this
paper.
Introduction
In this article I provide a commentary and critique on recent leadership theory, particularly that
version of it propagated in my own discipline of management. But rather than collude with the
idea of leadership as the disembodied application of competencies and capabilities, the anchor of
this paper is my experience. I seek to show how my evolving understanding, theorization and
critique of leadership has hinged off and at times been catapulted from, my experiences as a
woman teacher, and sometime leader, in a traditionally male institutional setting.
My experience has been one of firstly embracing received wisdom on leadership—learning
about it, including it in my teaching and to some degree, trying to live leadership according to
leadership ideology and discourse as I understood it. The article then charts my disaffection and
interrogation of leadership dogma, my wrestles with how to position myself and what I do in the
terrain of leadership. To some degree this paper is also about the death of Amanda as
‘Organisation/University/Business School Woman’ and the birth of some other, still forming,
incarnation of my professional and perhaps leadership, practice.
The conclusion I draw, from both a theoretical and personal point of view, is the importance
of reflectiveness and contestation in any practice of leadership. Like other women researchers on
educational leadership (Blackmore, 1999; Hall, 1996), I argue the value of mapping the ways in
which we collude with, resist and subvert the complex and predatory managerial discourses of
leadership which so saturate organizational life.
∗
Corresponding author: Amanda Sinclair, Melbourne Business School, The University of Melbourne, 200 Leicester
Street, Carlton, Vic 3053, email: [email protected]
1
Looking for Leadership
I describe seven destinations or stops along my journey around leadership. Though roughly
chronological, some of these destinations and the theoretical insights arising from them, are
concurrent.
Destination 1: Harvard Business School Cases and `Neutron Jack’ Welch
When I first joined the Melbourne Business School over a decade ago, I dutifully accepted that
the lessons for leadership lay in Harvard Business School cases. These cases delivered exciting
stories about blokes doing amazing things. Blokes such as Jack Welch or Neutron Jack,
described as such because he laid the ground bare like a bomb. It was the scorched earth
philosophy of organizational change.
In one sense it didn’t take long for me to feel a bit disillusioned by these examples of socalled ‘leadership’. But being the good, approval-hungry woman I was (and still am in too many
situations), I censored my own doubts and continued to try to find and extol the leadership that
others seemed to be confident was there, in the actions of overpaid, sharp talking American
CEOs, fond of using baseball and basketball analogies of teamwork. I tried to keep pace with
the tidal wave of ‘texts’ on leadership which arrived in our libraries—most emanating from the
United States and each more inflated than the preceding in its promises of being the ‘last word’
on leadership, yet each thinner and vacuous but simultaneously unapologetic about the lack of
any semblance of theoretical framework (Ozga & Walker, 1995).
I was partially able to acidly grumble about the shortcomings of the great leadership canon
because I wasn’t teaching leadership—this was left to someone else. I didn’t dare imagine I
might have something to say about this weighty topic—my contribution was the more
circumscribed areas of change or ethics. Though I had the unnerving experience again recently
of watching, with a group of executives, a video of Jack Welch (former CEO of General Electric)
being interviewed. I saw a controlling individual, but all around me others seem to be seeing
leadership.
My experience of not seeing leadership where others did led me to some useful insights, in
particular about the importance of projection in the leader-follower transaction. I have
subsequently argued that where we see leadership lying depends on our own experiences and
backgrounds (Sinclair, 1998). Part of the seduction in the leadership search is imagining and
seeing in leaders, a better self. This insight about the role of projection in creating leadership
explains the entrancement that many male managers and observers feel for certain leaders at the
height of their popularity. We see in leaders, perhaps all too briefly, a more perfectly desirable
idealisation of self.
Societies, I believe, also develop ‘archetypes’ of leadership. Jung’s term of archetypes is
useful here because it captures the power of collective but largely unconscious images of
leadership that dominate societies from their history and mythology. In the Australian case, the
archetype is of the lone frontier settler who is stoic but resolute in the face of hardship. Such an
image renders improbable a garrulous, emotionally expressive or more collectively-oriented
leader—women and many migrants from more group-based societies instantly struggle to earn
respect in this context. The study of social history is essential to plotting the power of archetypes
on social consciousness and yet, leadership literature is largely a-historical, relentlessly in the
present, suffering under the delusion that we have nothing to learn from the past.
However, back then at the first destination, I just wondered what was wrong with me that the
leadership exemplars and templates I was being offered, left me stone cold.
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Destination (or Deviation) 2: Being a Woman with Authority in a Business School
My first years as one of two junior female teachers at the Business School were difficult, to put it
mildly. I got caned (it felt literally) in student evaluations—most students in my classes expected
that business school teachers would be tough, dominant males who knew it all, either from their
research but more often from their extensive experiences consulting to industry. I have written
elsewhere (Sinclair, 1995b; 1997; 2000; 2001) about my attempts to mimic the aggression, and
intellectual and physical dominance of the classroom that I observed in the ‘most successful’ of
my colleagues.
Not surprisingly, trying to be one of the blokes was pathetically unsuccessful. I was criticized
for being too soft, or conversely too tough and too intrusive. I started to watch other women
teachers of predominantly male groups and observing a range of tactics women used to
camouflage their gender, as well as the responses from their audiences—often independent of
those tactics. Men responded in their ‘evaluations’: ‘she reminded me of my mother’, ‘she was
like a kindergarten teacher’. Out of desperation I started to undertake research and talk in forums
about my experiences. I wrote and gave a paper called ‘A Woman’s Guide to Teaching in a
Business School’. When I described my experiences of being undermined, feeling marginalized
and, on occasion, harassed, my male colleagues thought I was imagining things. Thankfully,
when I articulated these experiences to groups of university women, there was recognition, and
support.
At this point, as with many others in my career, research and particularly into disciplines
beyond my own, and some female colleagues, saved me. For my own survival in trying to
explain what was happening to me, I looked at the psychological and psychoanalytic research on
how people respond to female authority figures. I read with enormous relief that the tendency to
be very threatened by women with power was part of a well-documented and increasingly
theorised phenomenon—a fear of `the monstrous feminine’ to use Barbara Creed’s (1993)
wonderful phrase. Standard responses to these fears and anxieties are to trivialize and reduce
women’s power through sexualisation and maternalisation, sometimes infantilisation (Thornton,
1998). As Norma Grieve and Maggie Kirkman (1984) conclude from their study of obstacles to
women’s ordination ‘we feel more comfortable when female power is trivial and female
sexuality controlled … It is more reassuring when women collude by restricting their behaviour
to a gratifying, non-judgemental and non-controlling nurturance that applauds male
achievement’ (p. 488).
The burgeoning work on pedagogy (see for example Luke & Gore, 1992; Luke, 1996) and on
bodies in educational settings (for example Butler, 1993; Gallop, 1995) enabled me to
understand better the performance space of teaching and gave me new tools to theorise crossgender relations in business classrooms. My female body, in a position of power, interacted with
the audience, predominantly males, who were in unaccustomed positions of subordination.
Tuned into these dimensions of power, performance and bodies, I saw my experiences with fresh
insight, as issues for analysis, rather than matters for castigating myself.
The experiences that I was having as a female teacher of students used to male teachers, were
not then my imaginings nor simple manifestations of bad teaching. A different and more
complex set of phenomena and responses were invoked when I, a woman, was the one in charge.
There were more associations and more negative associations, or in psychoanalytic terms, more
transference with people unconsciously re-applying to their current interactions, primitive
3
feelings about their mothers from childhood, such as dependency and then rage at those feelings
of dependency. My body, as a woman’s body, was ‘read’ in different ways to my male
colleagues. A female student observed ‘I always noticed and interpreted what you had on. I
never did that with other lecturers’. Another visiting businessperson, disappointed when meeting
me for the first time, said ‘I thought professors had to be old and big. But never mind, your
reputation helps’.
At the time, it never occurred to me for a moment that any of this was about leadership. I read
these psychoanalytic and feminist theories secretly, if voraciously, for personal nourishment, not
because it had anything to do with what I taught, but because it helped me explain my
experience.
Now, these insights have become an important part of my understandings about how the
leadership of women is different from men—not because they necessarily do things differently
but that what they do is perceived differently. There is an extensive managerial literature which
documents this pattern of response (for example Eagly, 1992); and it is regularly seen in the
distinctively punitive, sadistic and dismissive responses we witness in reactions to women with
power. Yet interestingly enough, with a few exceptions, none of this is recognized in
mainstream leadership literature which continues to act as if leadership is an objectively defined
set of capabilities, discharged similarly regardless of whether one is white or black, man or
woman. And this is part of the problem, and the deeply unsatisfactory nature of much of
leadership literature.
Destination 3: Discovering Gender in Leadership: the revelation of masculinities and sexualities
My career at the Business School continued—my research was increasingly focused on gender
i.e. women’s experience, while my teaching and managerial responsibilities remained pretty
unconnected to this research. I was living two lives—the public organizational existence and the
much more satisfying one in the closet, doing the gender work that a number advised would be
the death of my career.
A revelatory research moment came for me with the Trials at the Top (Sinclair, 1994)
research which involved a group of academics and business people convened at The University
of Melbourne’s Australian Centre. We were interviewing CEOs about the obstacles to women in
ascending to senior management. In this research, I and my colleagues were focused on women,
until the moment I realized that you couldn’t understand leadership in the Australian corporate
context without recognizing masculinities and the way in which the two identities—as leader and
as man—worked together. I also started to ‘see’ sexualities at work in leadership (Sinclair,
1995c). The leadership literature is silent on the subject of sexualities—a device that theorists
recognize as a very good way of keeping its presence concealed and unproblematised.
There is now an extensive body of work theorizing sexualities in organizations (for example,
Hearn et.al. 1989; Collinson and Hearn 1994; Whitehead and Hoodley 1999; Hook 2001) but
very little examining sexualities and leadership—again revealing much about how leadership
discourses contribute to the idea of leadership as asexual. Yet my own observations from
studying Australian CEOs and MDs was that a strong sense of sexual identity as manly and
heterosexual was a reinforcing part of the leadership identity for men. By not recognizing or
theorizing this sexual identity, leaders are portrayed as above sex and, therefore, immune from
associations which might contaminate their greatness. On the other hand, women learned in most
leadership roles to strenuously conceal and camouflage their sexual identity as women. Any
4
evidence of their sexual appetites (affairs, children) or sexual sense of themselves was absolutely
taboo (Marshall, 1984; 1995).
Gender theory, including the emerging study of masculinities (Connell, 1995), feminist theory
and critical management theory all helped me begin to deconstruct leadership and leadership
commentary. In management literature, leadership is widely accepted as an uncontested good, an
ideal to which we should all strive. And the leadership ideology copes with the ‘bad apples’ by
describing people in formal positions of power as not ‘real’ leaders. They may have
obsequiously scraped or entrepreneurially lucked their way to the chief executive’s office but
they haven’t really got what it takes. This insight often comes with hindsight, when someone
who had been hailed as the great white (and typically they are) hope, goes off the rails and is
shown to be flawed. This kind of post-hoc rationalization of leadership is clearly unsatisfactory.
We need concepts of leadership that not only encompass but put at their centre the fragile
boundary many leaders tread with their dark-sides. Leaders are, by definition, more narcissistic,
prone to inflating their own importance and influence, adept at dismissing doubts and doubters.
Few leadership theories or theorists give proper account of such omnipresent qualities in the
ranks of leaders (exceptions include Kets de Vries, 1993; 2001; Gronn, 1999; Johnson 2001).
My recent research has been focused on showing how the whole way the discourse of
leadership is constructed perpetuates a particular ideology about what leadership looks like. It
advances the tough, heroic performance as the entire category and in so doing, maintains a
particular set of power and social relations. The performance and production of leadership has
political intent and effects, that is the concentration of power. Leadership scholars and
commentators have captured and co-opted the language of leadership to render some aspects,
such as the physicality and sexuality, invisible and undiscussable and other aspects so banal as to
appear benign: the ‘toughness’ the ‘commitment’, and the sacrifice of family.
Destination 4: My Organisational Work: Abdicating Leadership or Doing Leadership
Differently?
Leadership was now exposed as a highly suspect construct, but one located within a broader
managerial and corporate discourse that was going from strength to strength (Blackmore, 1999).
How was I to position what I did? In my interviews with women leaders I would often come
across those who simply refused to put themselves in the leadership category. Behind this refusal
is a range of motivations from modesty through to a more active rejection of leadership as too
dripping with white patriarchy to even remotely associate.
But do we just abandon the leadership domain to the huns of the Harvard Business Review,
particularly as it is such an authoritative discourse? In Doing Leadership Differently I argue we
should not exit but we should be present in the territory in a much more critical way. For
example, by eschewing comparative studies of female versus male leaders, which only serves to
further entrench the dominant assumptions and norms of leadership against which women are
measured.
But how also does one put critically reflective leadership into practice? Organisations provide
opportunities, platforms and challenges which can teach one a great deal about oneself as well as
enable influence over others. In my experience this drew me into doing things I felt uneasy and
uncomfortable about, as well as a lot of other things that were consummately time-wasting but
full of their own importance. These experiences can turn you into someone you don’t recognize
and someone you don’t like. I found myself with a title and fulfilling ‘leadership’ expectations
but with the uneasy feeling that I had been co-opted into a system endorsing values of
5
competition, materialism, achievement at the cost of relationships. Perhaps I should be more
blunt, organizations provide a revealing stage in which sides of yourself become exposed. In my
case these include the desire for approval and need to be liked, a fear of saying ‘no’, a belief that
I can control things, my difficulty fitting in with the male team or `being a team player’. These
have certainly got in the way of my ‘Doing Leadership Differently’. When I have caught sight of
myself getting deeply sucked in, I have heard myself say—I’ll just do this for now or until I can
resolve these pressing issues. The real me isn’t far away, just in cold storage for a short time (see
also Limerick and Anderson 1999).
Psychoanalytic writers have shown that one of our earliest and most enduring paradoxical
impulses are the desires to belong and the desires to be autonomous. The urge to belong and be
included is so strong that it can induce behaviours and actions that otherwise seem out of
character. At the same time, relinquishing too much of ourselves to the group threatens to
extinguish our autonomy (Sinclair, 1995a). We engage in an endless dance of securing enough
belonging while holding on to our uniqueness and autonomy. This seems to be a particularly
tough task for women in organizations. The belonging is not taken for granted or easily earned.
Sometimes everything I say or do seems to put people’s (the men around me) backs up.
Frequently, I feel in the organizations of which I am a part: ‘I don’t feel as if I belong’ and I
suspect this is a common experience for women. On the other hand, the lure of belonging is an
aphrodisiac for men and the women who find themselves accepted by the group, and it
encourages a high level of conformity, as we have seen in the complicit silence against bad
practice in boardrooms in Australia and the United States.
Destination 5: The Death of Organisation Woman
In many ways I feel that I have steadily extricated myself from ‘a leadership role’, really since
about 1996. Before that, I was ramping up—full-time academic, newly appointed professor, on
my way to positions of power and influence. My partner used to call me Wonderwoman and
Organisation Amanda was a bit like that—everything to everybody, doing it all. From the
outside, someone who was ‘balancing’ academic leadership, career, family etc. Inside, it wasn’t a
pretty picture.
In 1997, a year after my brother’s death and with an unexpected but delightful new baby, I
went ‘part time’ (I use this idea of ‘part-time’ as a boundary, a protection, an excuse). Since that
time I have steadily divested myself of as many other activities as I can in terms of university
and business school demands. I resolutely try to ration myself to those very few opportunities
where I think I can make a difference, change a situation for the better for people, provide some
really useful new insights that will be heard. Now the Vice Chancellor no longer rings me up
when he wants an extra person, or the required woman, for a committee. I say ‘I’m not
available’ to almost all the requests I get to sit on bodies and talk at things.
Does this mean I have opted out of leadership? Or am I doing leadership differently?
If we are to believe the leadership theorists then change is the one key requirement of
leadership. But to be able to envision and live change, one needs to go against standard
leadership practice. This is one of the great paradoxes of leadership—that leaders (i.e. those with
power and privilege in society) are probably in the worst position to be agents of change and,
more importantly, to be leaders who change themselves.
Leadership is cast in much of the literature as a forward progression—a unidimensional
‘thrust’ in the modernist directions of ‘growth’, ‘market dominance’, ‘expansion’. This unites
leadership with the global capital agenda—leadership becomes a tool of capital’s advance. But
6
from where I am standing, leadership of any value has a more complex stance toward change.
Leaders should not be the unthinking agents of a corporate agenda but use a variety of strategies
to question, re-shape, perhaps even undermine that agenda. There are times when leadership
requires reactions of resistance and detachment, subversion and antagonism. Heifetz (1997)
argues the value of leaders who remove themselves by ‘getting up on the balcony’ and not
necessarily protecting their organisations from necessary crises nor from conflict (Heifetz and
Linsky 2002). In the interests of real transformative change, leaders may need to adopt tactics
such as resistance and subversion (Bradshaw and Wicks 1997). Sometimes just being different
and holding against pressures to ‘fit’ the expected leadership performance can constitute
leadership. Admitting to not having answers, to needing time or the opportunity to seek counsel
are examples of this kind of passive resistance. Recasting leadership to include oppositional and
conflict strategies is also a way to avoid the shortcomings of much of the ‘women in leadership’
literature. Although there is some excellent research in feminist organization and leadership (see
for example Martin, 1989; Ferree & Martin, 1995), much of the managerially-oriented work ends
up colluding with the stereotypical view of women as all-collaborative, conflict avoiding,
endlessly empathic and in the end, ineffectual. When I came upon these idealistic lists of ‘how
women lead’, my heart sank. My own practice was very far from this ideal, but neither do the
lists capture the complex and multifaceted leadership of women I admire.
Destination 6: Looking for Inspiration for Unconventional Leadership
Equipped with a focus on leaders who do real change, including unsettling institutions and
changing themselves, I set off looking for inspiration in different places. I have found much to
observe and admire in the approach and strategies of Christine Nixon, the Victorian Police
Commissioner who happens to be the first women to lead a large police force in Australia or the
United States. I had been in the Chief Commissioner’s Office before under her two
predecessors—forbidding, silent, wood paneled places with rows of photos of serious men in
uniform. Secretaries were hunched and submissive, security arrangements, tightly controlled.
Arriving on the top floor under Christine’s leadership, the atmosphere was dramatically
different: a lot of chat and laughter, open doors, many people coming and going. Nixon’s
leadership is not designed to terrify people with her status and authority—yet she is very direct
on matters that count. She has faith in her own instincts and a sense of humour about herself. I
watch as people routinely underestimate her and reveal their own inadequacies in this
underestimation. I also watch as others grow with her trust in them. When asked in her job
interview by the Premier what her vision for the police was, she answered that she didn’t know,
she would have to talk to police members, the community and other stakeholders, first.
Volunteering that she didn’t have the answer to the inevitable vision question is an example of
Nixon’s leadership, but she brings her integrity and intuition to knowing how to move forward in
difficult or ambiguous situations. Don’t be afraid to be yourself—Christine’s example has taught
me this.
Another source of inspiration has been some work investigating Aboriginal Leadership and
my co-researcher is Lillian Holt, former Director of the Centre for Indigenous Education at the
University of Melbourne. While I do would not want to stereotype or impose a false unity on
Aboriginal leaders, I have observed some impressive, and unconventional leadership in this
research. Qualities include a readiness to speak directly and with emotion, a respect for silence
and listening (fewer words, more impact); and a strong belief in the value of historical and
cultural meanings. Lillian herself has taught me a lot, again with her own example. In her case as
7
in others, leadership is often about resisting the expectations of institutions and not conforming
to standardized ideas of what leaders and managers do—as she describes it, organizations are
very adept at ‘stealing your spirit’. Rather, it is about showing new ways to provide leadership:
disturbing complacency, confronting difficult issues and saying the unsayable. Lillian has also—
gently and tactfully—helped me take a tour of my own whiteness—and the unexamined and
assumed privilege that come with being white in our society—that has only just begun.
Despite the absorbing research journey that I have described, I continue to feel the power of
the leadership canon’s seduction. I have fallen on more than one of the ‘Handbooks of
Leadership’ thinking, ‘here is the answer, I could just prescribe this as a text and then my
students would feel content that they knew about leadership without any of my contortions’. The
educational context and requirement to ‘teach’ leadership continue to challenge our capacity to
put critically reflective theorization into practice.
Destination 7: Within
The journey I have described has swept me along in a wave of ostensible leadership success. But
all the time I have been conscious of the risk that, in any even partially successful mobilization
of a critique on the edge of leadership, I was probably rendering the canon more robust.
Enlarging leadership theory to encompass critique makes it all the more resistant to demolition.
In 2003, I took a year’s leave with an official agenda of sabbatical but more accurately a
desire to stop and allow space for other possibilities to emerge for me. Part of this year has been
qualifying as a yoga teacher, and this has drawn me to new destinations - eastern philosophies
which maintain that the source for leadership lies within. The path of going inwards and finding
new opportunities for growth reminds us that we are not our jobs and that we can begin to learn
again about taken-for-granted phenomena.
So leadership now, for me, has got less and less to do with the organizational route. I want to
take leadership out of the organizational context and put it in the life context. My experiences of
striking out into new territories has resonated for others and reinforced my conclusion that
leadership can take surprising forms. The value I can give as a leader is to encourage people,
especially those who might not have had lots of opportunities, to grow and take risks. Women
are particularly responsive to this, because they are unlikely to have been asked to think of
themselves as leaders or to reflect on their own leadership practice (Limerick and Heywood 19 ;
Limerick and Anderson 1999). If I think about where I might have made a difference, it is not in
the committees or the meetings, it is in the classroom, in relationships with students and
managers, in my writing and specifically offering a couple of ideas which have opened up new
ways of seeing for people.
My recent thinking has also included going back, facing and unpacking the parts of my self
that I was so desperate to leave behind and ‘out of the picture’ of the successful professor.
Valerie Hall (1996) in her research with female principals also found that women sought to make
their leadership an extension of self rather than enact an inflated or overly manufactured self in
the leadership role. An important part of re-finding lost or marginalized selves can include, for
women, one’s identity as a woman. We have failed if, to demonstrate leadership, we have lost
connection with our gender and sexual identity. How do women bring their sense of
womanliness, femaleness and sexuality, into the way they lead? It is nothing as overt as dress or
body language (Sinclair 1995c; 1998). But I believe this leadership implies an integrity of values
and practices, a sense of the whole person (not a disembodied intellect or a single agent without
family or responsibilities), a sense of ownership of the privileges of one’s race or class.
8
Leadership for me grows out of seeking to understand the impact of these things on the way we
do our jobs, influence others and go about our lives.
In practice for me, working towards this integrity of self involves not allowing my own
instincts about what is important to get swamped by bureaucratic demands or extinguished by the
exhaustion of trying to do everything. I need to accept that I am not good at many things and to
support others in doing these. My contribution is to not become trapped by institutional
pressures, to not go into camouflage, to not get reduced in what I do by the urgent, but
profoundly trivial clutter which occupies much of organizational life.
This going-inward stage of the journey is packed with its own hazards. I start to sound very
new-age, like those reconstructed life coaches who’ve seen the light and preach, with audacious
vacuity, discovery of the inner self. The postmodernists are sensibly skeptical of the illusion of a
single authentic identity, and all of us juggle and have imposed on us multiple and conflicting
identities, some privileged, others marginalised. On the other hand, to have too big a gulf
between the self we are outside work and the self -as-leader, has always felt to me like a
dangerous place to be. Leadership is an extension of self and when the work one does as a leader
starts to feel like someone else’s overcoat, then it’s time to reassess.
Conclusion
Leadership, as we understand it in contemporary societies and organizations, is undoubtedly a
white, male idea, a motif manufactured and embroidered by managerial elites to legitimize habits
and advance their interests. An important part of leadership scholarship and, I would argue, the
practice of leadership, is to critique and subvert imposed and received notions of leadership. As
Blackmore argues ‘The lens of privilege ... requires women in leadership to consider their
position, to better understand how and why they came to be in that position and how they can use
that position to challenge and transform exclusive images of leadership into more inclusive ones’
(1995, p. 35).
Finding a space for leading given these concerns and constraints is no easy task. As others
have researched and written about powerfully, it is challenging indeed to pursue a path and a
practice which recognizes and usefully engages with the structural constraints of societies and
organizations, but still finds ways of empowering oneself and others. Nevertheless there are
people, and particularly women, working at these frontiers of innovative leadership practice and
I have cited two examples here. Scholarship and learning will be made richer by casting the net
for leadership exemplars in radically different places.
My journey around leadership has left me with little appetite to participate in the conventional
debate about, or schooling in, leadership. In too many accounts, leaders are treated as ‘the given’
who sit above the dramatic processes of change that they set in train for their organization. In my
view, leaders are not leaders if they are immune from personal change themselves. I have also
tried to resist a scholarly temptation in this article—to mount a critique of leadership that is
theoretically robust but dry and unencumbered by the emotions that are at the heart of our
attachments to leaders and our own aspirations to leadership. For this is to fall into another
discourse—not as hegemonic but repressive in its own way.
Rather I hope that some contribution may be made in writing about leadership in a way that
resists the objectified, disembodied, de-gendered and positivist tradition of the vast bulk of
leadership research. The account I have offered here may be judged too personal a narrative but I
have sought to build theorisation from reflexivity. My intention is to be in the leadership space,
as chronicler and sometime participant, in an owned and critically reflective way, showing that it
is what is left out of most leadership accounts that is most deserving of our attention.
9
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Journey around Leadership
Amanda Sinclair
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